This study recovers Italo Calvino's central place in a lost history of interdisciplinary thought, politics, and literary philosophy in the 1960s. Drawing on his letters, essays, critical reviews, and fiction, as well as a wide range of works--primarily urban planning and design theory and history--circulating among his primary interlocutors, this book takes as its point of departure a sweeping reinterpretation of Invisible Cities. Passages from Calvino's most famous novel routinely appear as aphorisms in calendars, posters, and the popular literature of inspiration and self-help, reducing the novel to vague abstractions and totalizing wisdom about thinking outside the box. The shadow of postmodern studies has had a similarly diminishing effect on this text, rendering up an accomplished but ultimately apolitical novelistic experimentation in endless deconstructive deferrals, the shiny surfaces of play, and the ultimately rigged game of self-referentiality. In contrast, this study draws on an archive of untranslated Italian- and French-language materials on urban planning, architecture, and utopian architecture to argue that Calvino's novel in fact introduces readers to the material history of urban renewal in Italy, France, and the U.S. in the 1960s, as well as the multidisciplinary core of cultural life in that decade: the complex and continuous interplay among novelists and architects, scientists and artists, literary historians and visual studies scholars. His last love poem for the dying city was in fact profoundly engaged, deeply committed to the ethical dimensions of both architecture and lived experience in the spaces of modernity as well as the resistant practices of reading and utopian imagining that his urban studies in turn inspired.

From the myth of Arcadia through to the twenty-first century, ideas about sustainability – how we imagine better urban environments – remain persistently relevant, and raise recurring questions. How do cities evolve as complex spaces nurturing both urban creativity and the fortuitous art of discovery, and by which mechanisms do they foster imagination and innovation? While past utopias were conceived in terms of an ideal geometry, contemporary exemplary models of urban design seek technological solutions of optimal organisation. The Venice Variations explores Venice as a prototypical city that may hold unique answers to the ancient narrative of utopia. Venice was not the result of a preconceived ideal but the pragmatic outcome of social and economic networks of communication. Its urban creativity, though, came to represent the quintessential combination of place and institutions of its time. Through a discussion of Venice and two other works owing their inspiration to this city – Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital – Sophia Psarra describes Venice as a system that starts to resemble a highly probabilistic ‘algorithm’, that is, a structure with a small number of rules capable of producing a large number of variations. The rapidly escalating processes of urban development around our big cities share many of the motivations for survival, shelter and trade that brought Venice into existence. Rather than seeing these places as problems to be solved, we need to understand how urban complexity can evolve, as happened from its unprepossessing origins in the marshes of the Venetian lagoon to the ‘model city’ that endured a thousand years. This book frees Venice from stereotypical representations, revealing its generative capacity to inform potential other ‘Venices’ for the future.

This volume offers a detailed analysis of selected cases in the reception, translation and artistic reinterpretation of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities (1972) around the world. The book traces the many different ways in which Calvino's modern classic has been read, translated and adapted in Brazil, France, the Netherlands and Flanders, Mexico, Romania, Scandinavia, the USSR, China, Poland, Japan and Australia. It also offers analyses of the relation between Calvino's book and, respectively, the East and Africa, as well as reflections on the book's inspiration for, and resonance in, dance, architecture and art. The volume thus traces the diversity in the reception and circulation of Invisible Cities in different countries and continents, offering a much wider framework for the discussion of Calvino’s masterpiece than before, and a more detailed picture of its cultural and linguistic ramifications. This book will be of interest to scholars in Comparative Literature, World Literature, Translation Studies, Italian Studies, Romance Languages, European Studies, Dance, Architecture and Media Studies, as well as to scholars specialised in paratext and reception.

In 1972, Italo Calvino published Invisible Cities, a literary book that masterfully combines philosophy and poetry, rigid structure and free play, theoretical insight and glittering prose. The text is an extended meditation on urban life, and it continues to resonate not only among literary scholars, but among social scientists, architects, and urban planners as well. To commemorate the 50th anniversary of Invisible Cities, this collection of essays serves as both an appreciation and a critical engagement. Drawing from a wide array of disciplinary perspectives and geographical contexts, this volume grapples with the theoretical, pedagogical, and political legacies of Calvino’s work. Each chapter approaches Invisible Cities not only as a novel but as a work of evocative ethnography, place-writing, and urban theory. Fifty years on, what can Calvino’s dreamlike text offer to scholars and practitioners interested in actually existing urban life?

Examines Perec's impact on architecture, art, design, media, electronic communications, computing and the everydayWhat do Perec's descriptions of the minutiae of everyday life reveal about our use of information and communications technologies?What happens if we read Life: A Users Manual as a toolbox of ideas for games studies? What light does the concept of the ainfra-ordinary shed on social media? What insights does algorithmic writing generate for the digital humanities? What lessons can architects, artists, game-designers and writers draw from Perec's fascination with creative constraints? Through an examination of such questions, this collection takes Perec scholarship beyond its existing limits to offer new ways of rethinking our present.ContributorsTom Apperley, Monash University, Australia.Caroline Bassett, University of Sussex, UK. David Bellos, Princeton, USA.Justin Clemens, University of Melbourne, Australia.Ben Highmore, University of Sussex, UK.Alison James, University of Chicago, USA.Sandra Kaji-OGrady, University of Sydney, Australia. Christian Licoppe, TA(c)lA(c)com ParisTech, France.Anthony McCosker, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia. Mireille RibiA*re, independent scholar, translator and author.Darren Tofts, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia.Rowan Wilken, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia.Mark Wolff, Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York, USA.

The essays in this volume provide a theorization of what we might call the “denatured” wild, in other words a notion of environmental “restoration” or "reinhabitation" that recognizes and reconfigures the human factor as an interdependent entity. Acknowledging the contributions of Marco Armerio, Serenella Iovino, Giovanna Ricoveri, Patrick Barron and Anna Re among others, Ecocritical Approaches to Italian Culture and Literature: The Denatured Wild negotiates the ground within the historicizing, theoretical perspectives, and surveying spirit of these writers. Despite the central role that nature has played in Italian culture and literature, there has been an evident lack of critical approaches free of the bridles of the socio-political manipulations of nationalism. The authors in this collection, by recognizing the groundbreaking work of many non-Italian ecocritics, challenge the narrowly defined conventions of Italian Studies and illuminates complexities of an Italian ecocriticism that reveals a rich environmentally engaged literary and cultural tradition.

This book continues the exploration of themes either neglected or devalued by others working in the field of philosophy and culture. The authors in this volume consider the domain of travel from the broadest and most diverse of philosophical perspectives, covering everyday topics ranging from commuting and vacation travel to immigration and forced relocation. Our time in transit, our being in transit, and our time at rest, whether by choice or edict, has always been at issue, always been at play (and has always been in motion, if you will), for our species. The essays collected here explore the possibilities of the material impact of being able to move or stay put, as well as being forced to go or prevented from leaving.